The opinions expressed in these forums do not represent those of C2, and any discussion of profit/loss
is not indicative of future performance or success.
There is a substantial risk of loss in trading. You should therefore carefully consider
whether such trading is suitable for you in light of your financial condition. You should read,
understand, and consider the Risk Disclosure Statement that is provided by your broker
before you consider trading. Most people who trade lose money.
We are in luck, sir. Using the Grid, we can sift through all the chaff and find that there are exactly five strategies whose annual return is greater than 50% when applied with a few other token safety parameters: in existence for > 2 years, max drawdown < 50%, profit factor > 0.1. Of these, one is a one-trick pony (Tesla), two others had big wins early on and have not sustained such a high return rate, leaving two futures strategies that are still booming along, both from the same Trade Leader, and each apparently earning several thousands in subscription fees per
month. Perhaps soon (two years) we’ll join them in the stratosphere!
Oh! And both of those are also 100% TOS certified, big plus there for such highflying strategies. Kudos to the Trade Leader.
$1,000,000 with 50% return for 35 years becomes over a trillion. Aka if that statement about people in the 90s was true it was temporary. The greatest long term traders and investors are far far below 50%.
Most people won’t beat the indexes. Virtually none will beat it on a risk adjusted basis in the long run.
I wish you luck with your system but expecting to make 50% annualized for long periods like 10 years just isn’t likely. But I look forward to being proved wrong
If you have read any of mu other posts you see that I am hoping for the same thing! I have run extended backtesting and a very small amount of forward testing in one of my accounts. THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT a viable system for me or anyone else to trade YET.
Just stumbled upon this post and nearly fell off my chair…
“Common sense” is that if you believe that trading performance = returns (the hubris of retail), then you should do something else with your time entirely. Gambling aims at gains. Trading aims at risk-adjusted gains through risk management.
If your premise about “beating the market” through returns alone were true, then anyone could do it by buying and holding a leveraged ETF, and then wait enough time for the historically proven upside drift in equity indices to do its job.
The difference between traders and amateurs is shown when NORMALIZING returns for risk over a statistically significant sample involving years of activity and thousands of trades. Skills are shown when a trader is capable of distorting the risk/reward ratio that is passively available through mere buy-and-hold of the index, NOT by comparing returns. For that matter, returns are a variable, arbitrary CHOICE made by the trader by intentionally dialing the scale of his positions around the fixed risk/reward ratio delivered by his strategy, and according to his own personal risk aversion. In other words, returns alone reveal exactly NOTHING about a trader’s skills.
In summary: trading performance = RISK-ADJUSTED returns. Not believing this is how you end up with 5 systems still alive and kicking in the C2 database after 8 years of existence, out of thousands created over the lifetime of the platform. I rest my case.
The last big S&P drawdown reached 60.4% after 2000 and lasted 13 long years.
Keep that in mind if you think that buying and holding leveraged S&P 500 ETFs will generate “easy” money.
But yes, as you mentioned earlier, returns must be calculated on a risk-adjusted basis, no doubt about that.
